Traveling the Many “Crooked and Wide” Ways: Allegorical Beckoning in Eudora Welty’s Losing Battles

Abstract

Traveling the Many “Crooked and Wide” Ways: Allegorical Beckoning in Eudora Welty’s Losing Battles Seth Hagen Much critical attention has been given to Eudora Welty’s use of symbols and mythology in her fiction, but there has been no thorough examination of her use of allegory.1 Yet allegory finds its way into Welty’s fiction as she makes use of names, characters, and features of landscape that invite investigation of another, submerged level of meaning. This is not to say that any of Welty’s fiction is strictly allegorical—at least with respect to the traditional understanding of the form—but that Welty’s texts often teasingly beckon the reader to interpret the text allegorically and then complicate and frustrate the revelation of a singular second level of meaning. In this essay, I will examine how Welty incorporates many facets of allegory in her novel Losing Battles. As part of this investigation, I first provide a brief overview of allegory in order to develop a working concept for my argument. I then turn to John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress—one of the most widely read allegorical texts in all of literature—both to offer a paradigmatic example of traditional allegory and to allow an understanding of how Welty engages with Bunyan’s text. Then, after reviewing Welty’s personal familiarity with The Pilgrim’s Progress and identifying her allusions to it throughout her work, I turn my attention to Losing Battles. In focusing on Welty’s long novel, I scrutinize those features that allegorically beckon to the reader as I explore and seek to articulate how Welty’s technique suggests allegory but complicates the expected delivery of a second level of meaning. In examining the ways in which Losing Battles radically changes how Bunyan’s type of allegory operates, I suggest that Welty’s approach opposes and dismantles the kind of controlled didacticism of allegories like The Pilgrim’s Progress. By so doing, Welty, in Losing Battles, frames traditional allegory as harmfully reductive to experience and meaning, demonstrating a perspective aligned with that manifested in Walter Benjamin’s theory of how allegory operates. Consistent with Benjamin’s understanding, Welty, in Losing Battles, portrays the destructive force of allegory as an apt metaphor for how the history of human experience proceeds; humanity moves forward imposing arbitrary meaning on the past, creating fragments of life [End Page 103] that shatter the subject it tries to capture. In her novel, Welty identifies the destructive inevitability of this allegorical process on human experience and, while accepting it, also seeks to excavate, mine, and preserve fragments discarded by the allegorical voice of mainstream history. Losing Battles reflects recognition of the power of art and narratives to simultaneously preserve and destroy, and it uses this power to assert the voices of those unheard and disenfranchised by the dominant hegemonic culture. It dismantles the authoritarian control of allegories such as The Pilgrim’s Progress by allegorically beckoning the reader to consider a second level of meaning but supplying an unbounded multiplicity of meaning rather than asserting a singular, correct interpretation. In this way, Welty’s novel both invites the reader to consider the value of the voices lost to history and aims its own allegorically destructive power at the confining narratives of dominant culture. An Introduction to Allegory It will be useful to first develop an understanding of allegory in order to later examine the ways in which Bunyan and Welty approach and make use of the form. Allegory, as a genre or form of literature, has existed since classical times. The word “allegory” derives from the Greek word allegoreo, which is formed from combining allos, meaning “other,” and agoero, meaning “to speak in a place of assembly, the agora, or marketplace” (Tambling 6). Allegory thus means to speak of one thing patently while simultaneously speaking of another more latent thing. It is distinguished from the simile and the metaphor in that it is extended, sustained, and consistent over the course of a text. Elizabeth Watson writes that a familiar explanation of tropes in the Renaissance held that “a simile is like a star, a metaphor is a star and an allegory is...